Many electronic systems involve the maintenance and storage of vast amounts of information. If the information is not organized for optimum search performance, searching the information to find a particular piece or pieces of information can be unacceptably time consuming. In addition to resulting in sometimes unacceptably long search times, some approaches to organizing information result in unpredictable search times. Thus, when an organizational approach results in unpredictable search times, some pieces of information may be found in a relatively short amount of time, while finding other pieces takes a relatively long amount of time.
To improve search performance, both in terms of search time and predictability, several organizational approaches have been developed. The Adelson-Velskii and Landis' (AVL) tree, for instance, is an approach that results in better search performance for large amounts of information—e.g., in terms of both search time and predictability, than other approaches to organizing information, such as hash tables. Although search performance for information organized using an AVL tree may be better than for information organized using other approaches, conventional techniques to maintain the information as an AVL tree can consume significant computing resources. Consequently, AVL trees may not be used to organize some information even though they could result in better search performance than other organizational approaches.